Triplett Chek-A-Cell: Ignorance is Never Bliss, Especially When it Comes to Batteries

It doesn’t matter how laid-back or paranoid you were up until then: there comes a time in everyone’s life when they start to worry about when the batteries are going to die. For some, it may happen when they’re out hiking, get lost as darkness is closing in, and begin wondering “When was the last time I changed the batteries in this flashlight?” For others, it happens when they’re rushing to finish a project on a single laptop-battery charge, because the plug-in power supply is nowhere to be found. For me, it happened right after the battery in my first car quit on me in the parking lot as I was trying to leave work- after replacing it, I’d get a pang of panic every so often, and ask myself, “Wait a minute: how long is this thing good for?”

The sad thing is, most of our Average Joe battery-related woes are nothing compared to what IT techs and facility managers have to deal with on a regular basis. Critical things like servers, fire alarm systems and security networks use battery backups in case of power outages, so that important data isn’t lost, and safety isn’t compromised. To be on the safe side, you pretty much need to replace batteries more often than necessary, so that you don’t run the risk of them dying on you when you need them most. The only problem is, “just-in-case” battery changes can end up costing you a lot more than you really need to spend. So how do you stretch out the time between battery replacements without putting your system at risk?

The answer, in this case, is the Triplett Chek-A-Cell battery tester. Designed to evalute the charges of 6 and 12 volt sealed lead acid batteries that fall between 1 and 10 amp hours, this unit gives you a quick reading of the state of your battery when you apply the Chek-A-Cell’s two probes to the battery’s contacts. The built-in Ohm meter mode allows the Chek-A-Cell to detect both AC and DC voltage, and you get an almost instant read-out on a large LED display. Because the process is so quick and easy, it lets you keep tabs on what’s really going on with your batteries, instead of always assuming the worst and overspending. A little bit of battery knowledge can really pay off.